Tuesday, March 6, 2018

Fanny and Alexander Part I

Psychoanalysts talk about screen memories, which are
distortions of childhood experience that sometimes camouflage other recollections. The viewer of a Bergman movie essentially
finds him or herself placed in the position of a child as alternating idyllic
and terrifying images are transformed in recollection. This, of course, is
something that Bergman’s own characters do, too. In part I of Fanny and Alexander, currently in
revival at Film Forum, the grandmother, Helena Ekdahl (Grunn Wallgren), tells Isak Jacobi
(Erland Josephson), the film’s resident Jew, and her one-time lover, “the happy
splendid life is over.” In fact all that remains is memory, one of which is the
time her deceased husband caught them in flagrante—an incident she now refers to as
a Feydeau farce. Who knows what it was actually like when Mr. Ekdahl ran for his gun? Her son Oscar (Allan Edwall), the theater manager, remarks to
his crew,“I love the little world
inside of this playhouse.” Hamlet, by
the way, is the production in the works and a portent of the terrible loss that will soon change all their lives. Bergman is
capable of portraying joy, as in the take where Sven Nyqvist’s camera lovingly pans around the Ekdahl Christmas table at which servants dine with their employers. And there’s great comedy and sensuality in portrayal of the relationship between the randy
Gustav (Jari Kulle) and Alma (Mona Malme) his self-deprecatingly tolerant wife.
But Bergman’s debt to Strindberg is evinced in the brilliance of his depiction
of self-hating characters. Carl, the perpetually bankrupt academic asks “how is it that one
becomes second rate?” And goes on to tell his stoic German wife, Lydia
(Christina Schollin), “I’m most unkind to the creature who cares for me.” The
prologue to the movie provides the palette with the camera zooming in on the figurines
of a musical clock, the shimmering crystal of an elegant chandelier and the surrealist vista of a statue come to life. Fanny and Alexander is a period piece that begins in l907, but even
as the characters occupy themselves with their present lives, they're haunted by their own fates.

About Me

Francis Levy's debut novel, Erotomania: A Romance, was released in August 2008 by Two Dollar Radio.
His short stories, criticism, humor, and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Village Voice, The East Hampton Star, The Quarterly, Penthouse, Architectural Digest, TV Guide, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, and other publications. One of his Voice humor pieces was anthologized in The Big Book of New American Humor (HarperCollins). He is presently the Co-Director of The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination (philoctetes.org), where he supervises roundtable discussions on topics as varied as “The Psychology of the Modern Nation State” and “Modern Traffic Theory, Behavior, and Imagination”.